


Metamorphosis

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: Harsh Realm
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 10:13:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the early morning, beside a stream, Tom meditates on Things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Metamorphosis

When the sun rises he's awake and watching it, staring at it until it rises too high to look at any longer. Before it gets that high it's red, a deep bloody color, and it completely holds his attention. If Mike were awake he'd cuff the back of his head and talk about how one day he'll get them all killed. Mike isn't awake. Mike is curled at his side and breathing heavily, and so far gone like this, it's easy to feel that nagging little twinge of affection.

Affection isn't what he feels a lot of the rest of the time. Mike is sleeping because it's his turn, but the night before, at least in the earlier hours of darkness, there hadn't been a lot of sleeping on either side.

They'll both be tired today. They'll both be snapping at each other. The night before, he'd had a flash of clarity and realized how dangerous it is, if Mike's letting his guard down at least a little, and even if he isn't, Tom's a liability in that situation. Tom could talk about how one day Mike will get them all killed.

In the morning, in the lingering afterglow, it seems like it might be worth it.

He gets up and heads a little way down the gully, on the edge of which they're camped, because clear and flowing water is a luxury and they can't turn it away when they find it. He crouches in the mud, pulls off his shirt and splashes water over his head and face and hands and back, gasping and shivering at the cold of it. The sun catches the water in the air and makes it sparkle like the light itself gone liquid, and through the bright scatter he sees the red marks of the rope on his wrists. When he palms water over his back it cools faded welts.

He stays there for a few moments, letting the water run down his arms and back, drying in the morning breeze. Staring at the marks on his wrists with a kind of wonder. Last night feels very far away. He'd asked for it. He'd begged. It's like someone else's memory.

_Mike's calm, firm, in a kind of control he's never seen before. It's almost gentle, and there is a gentle side even to the knife edge of him, a smoothness on the side of the blade. When Mike tells him to get down on his knees he does. When Mike tells him to kiss his boots, he does. When Mike tells him to stand and put his wrists together in front of him, he does. He does it without thinking, cleaner and crisper than orders beaten into him by hours of repetition. There's been a few times now, for this, but it's still so much faster and so much easier than it should be. He would never have thought he had this in him._

He's had to get comfortable with pain, had to learn to use it as a motivation. You learn that kind of thing starting in boot camp and you keep learning it, letting it grind its way into the marrow of your bones when you're exhausted and hungry and it's a hundred and three in the shade and you know that when you pull off your boots your socks will be soaked with blood, but you keep on running. You take the heat and the freezing cold, and far too long without sleep. You crawl through the mud on your belly and you don't ever really learn to love it, but you learn to use it. You learn to let it push you. You learn to let one pain block out another just to keep you sane, and you learn to close your eyes and breathe.

_So he breathes, when Mike hits him, and it starts gentle—the very first time it had been so gentle, almost frustratingly so, jarring in the way he could sense that Mike was nervous—but that's all gone now, and the strokes of the belt across his shoulders are firm and unhesitating. He gasps, bites back his cries, and he works the pain over in his mind like a fine wine in his mouth, exploring all the facets and flavors, the immediate bitterness and the sweet, thick aftertaste. One pain blocks out another, and even this pain isn't so bad. It's the impact more than the pain, the blow itself and the way his body shakes with it. Crouched here on the ground with a fire warm at his side and the stars bright over him, he feels like this might be a kind of happiness. It's simple, anyway. Or it looks like it._

_Sophie,_ he thinks, and what he feels isn't guilt, but a sense of loss, because there's now an even bigger part of him that she won't ever be able to touch. It had already been there; the war-part of his head is a thing he keeps from her, his memories and his nightmares, or at the very least he dilutes the horror for her, because how could you let that touch someone you love?

But this is more. He scrubs his hands over his face and sighs. How could you let that touch someone you love? How could you hit someone you love? It should be an alien idea to him, incomprehensible.

Mike doesn't love him.

He doesn't think Mike loves him. He really doesn't think so.

A bird lands across the stream from him, dusky and black-eyed, and it cocks its head at him before it splashes into the water, feathers ruffling and shivering as it bathes. It's not afraid of him.

_A bird cries in the night and Tom lets a cry out with it, stifled a second later but he's not sorry. Mike's hand closes around his throat, his own pulse pounds up into a crescendo in his cheeks and teeth and ears and behind his eyes. Mike's hand closes around his throat and when it's removed he smells the thick musk of his cock, his mouth opens instinctively, and he tastes sweet-salt. He's not afraid of him._

_How did I get here?_ He still doesn't know where this came from. It's been two years, maybe it's the strain. Maybe the loneliness, because the intimacy of crouching in a foxhole with someone only goes so far, and Mike keeps himself closed up so tight, and Florence doesn't speak. Florence, with her deep expressive eyes, and yet at times her continuous silence makes him want to scream to fill the spaces.

Maybe he's just losing his mind. He already lost the wedding ring. This could just be the next step.

_How can I go home to her now?_ He's not sure he can. But that started a long time ago, and it doesn't have anything to do with Mike. It started the day he stumbled on a twelve year old girl being raped by two men in an alley, and when they looked up and saw him standing there with his hand on his gun they blew her into a digital light show before he could do anything. She died terrified and suffering and there was nothing he could do. He's seen things like that before, but here they're everywhere, every day. Murder. Horror. He's walked into towns and there haven't been any bodies, just an oppressive stillness, but he's looked up and seen the nooses dangling from a row of gallows, and he knows what's happened. He's walked into rooms with walls and floors spattered old, decaying red, and he knows what's happened, and when he turns away with his eyes blurred with angry tears there's Mike, waiting for him.

So maybe that's why.

He's been changed. The Realm changes you. The truth is that you can't ever go home, because you don't even exist anymore.

He gets slowly to his feet and heads back up to the camp, where Mike is stirring, sitting up and rubbing his eyes. There's no speech as Tom starts to rake up the coals, get the fire going again, so he can heat up whatever they've scrounged together for breakfast to a point where it's edible. No speech, but before Mike heads down to the stream to wash he pauses, bends, trails his fingertips over the marks on Tom's back and Tom makes a quiet sound and closes his eyes and leans back against the touch. Just the touch. In the end maybe that's all he wants.

Mike bends further, presses a soft kiss to one of the welts, and something in Tom's chest unfurls. Something alive.

He can't go back. He could go forward, only he doesn't know what forward is anymore. But right here, right now... it might be the best he can do. It might have to be enough.

It might be enough.


End file.
